Hofstede's Five Dimensions

Geert Hofstede was born in 1928 in the Netherlands. He had an interesting life pretty much filled with cultural shocks. Around his twentieth birthday, he decided to leave his native Netherlands and go to explore other places in the world. He went to do an internship as an assistant ship’s engineer in Indonesia; this was his first time out of the country and it proved to be his first cultural shock. Being immersed in a completely different culture, he was keen to observe and compare the cultural differences between the Netherlands and his new host country. Following his work experience in Indonesia, he followed his heart – a girl – to England, where he experienced his second cultural shock. This greatly influenced his career path, and led him to study cross-cultures.

Later on in life, he became a renowned researcher in cross-cultural differences, and even created a model which could be applied to the various cultures, to help understand their behaviours. Hofstede’s “Five Cultural Dimensions” include Power Distance (which focuses on the degree of equality, or inequality, between people in the country’s society); Individualism (which focuses on the degree the society reinforces individual or collective achievement and interpersonal relationships); Masculinity (which focuses on the degree the society reinforces, or does not reinforce, the traditional masculine work role model of male achievement, control, and power); Uncertainty Avoidance (which focuses on the level of tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity within the society - i.e. unstructured situations); and last but not least, Long-Term Orientation (which focuses on the degree the society embraces, or does not embrace, long-term devotion to traditional, forward-thinking values).

Although Geert Hofstede’s model was innovative, he was not the first cultural researcher to propose a model describing ways in which cultures can be analysed. Edward Twitchell Hall, Jr. (born in 1914 and died in 2009) was also an